CHAPTER SIX
London is more like itself than Tess remembers—like a hologram, or a scene from 'Notting Hill.' When she passes a red fire hydrant or a phone box (a phone box, still!) or a bobby with a round hat, it all seems exaggeratedly, prettily British. The pubs are decorated with hanging baskets of bright flowers and there's a shop near her hotel that has sold nothing but umbrellas for 150 years. She buys Lorna a Princess Kate mask, and Tom a double-decker bus stapler. She can't concentrate at all.
After the conference dinner on Thursday night, she walks around the hotel room, the bathroom, turns on the TV. She should call home but she's too busy having imaginary conversations with Mitya. The scenarios veer from moonlit walks along the Seine followed by passionate love-making to gutting humiliation. They are absorbing but ridiculous because Tess knows that whatever you imagine in advance— both for good (lottery wins!) and bad (tattooed cretin abductors)— reality never obeys the script.
The next day she excuses herself from lunch and catches a cab to Kings Cross St Pancras station. There is something about those English black cabs; it's like climbing into a dark, felt-lined booth. Behind the glass screening off the driver hangs a mirror in which a pair of neutral, all-seeing eyes are there, just for you. She could tell those eyes anything. But she can't explain what she's doing, even to herself, so she keeps her mouth shut.
Tess pays in cash for a ticket on the Eurostar to Paris. The strangeness of doing something with paper money makes it feel criminal. For the last day of the conference she can't tell whether the flutter in her stomach is the old one from Mitya, or a new one, from deceit.
On the train under the Channel Tess opens her computer to his site. The wifi doesn't work so she can only stare at his face.
She feels like a teenager, or an addict. Mitya's face is worn but the same, both hopeful and hopeless at once. He seems to have chipped a tooth, though it could be a bad quality picture. What does she want from him? The thought of getting her clothes off in front of someone who hasn't had years to acclimate to her body makes her shudder in the upholstered seat. It's not that. She is looking for something, some feeling that she had then and that appears to have been lost.
The room (Tess pays again with cash) is in a 'boutique' hotel in the 11th arrondissement. It is sweet and clean, with yellow shepherdesses on the wallpaper, but so small there's no space to open her suitcase on the floor and she has to do so on the bed, then stand it upright again when she wants to lie down. It is five o'clock. Tess needs to wait till six-thirty to leave, so as to arrive when plenty of people are already at the exhibition. She lies down and counts the shepherdesses.
Then she gets up, puts on a black dress, and looks at her face in the mirror. Something has gotten hold of her—something ugly and self-pitying, something that wants to take revenge on the unknown, unhappy Sukie, on Terry/Terence, on whatever it is that has stolen her father's mind. She dresses it up as 'I deserve this,' as 'you only live once,' and even, as she pushes her hair back off her forehead, 'this is what they do in France.'
In the French taxi she has no urge to confess. She watches out the window as they wind through the little streets of the 11th, and then the tinier, cobbled ones of the Marais.
The car stops. There is no gallery.
'You can't find it?' Tess asks.
'Mais oui, madame. We've arrived.'
Tess looks out. The gallery has shrunk from the exaggerated, wide-angle pictures on Facebook to a single shop front. People are spilling out onto the street, smoking cigarettes.
'Please, keep going,' she says.
'Compris, madame,' the driver says.' She gets out two blocks away.
As Tess makes her way inside the gallery, it occurs to her that Mitya might experience this as an ambush. Too late. Whatever force has taken her over, it can't leave her now. She passes a tall, fat man with a moustache and a fedora surveying the crowd, saying loudly, 'Ou il est, mon p'tit Russe?' She says 'pardon' half a dozen times, clinging to a glass of champagne as she turns sideways to slither past the black-clad backs of people talking in what appear to be hermetically sealed groups. As usual at these things she feels incredibly uncomfortable, and as usual no one is looking at the art except the sole other friendless person at the end of the room. Her heart beats a couple of times, hard, out of rhythm. She scans the room for him—a white room, with ceiling lights in rows shining on his work, which seems, now she looks at it, to be weather or moods—pure compositions of colour and form and light. They are not terrible, Tess thinks, but you'd have to bring a lot to them.
About halfway down, she sees him. He is standing with three other people, turned slightly away, but she'd recognise that profile anywhere—flat forehead, straight nose. The fat man in the fedora is closing in behind her, still calling out. Tess grips her glass and keeps going. At times in her life—admittedly more dramatic times (including final exams, speech-giving, and childbirth) she has had the feeling as she entered the hall, or went up to the microphone, or changed breathing strategy, that so much of courage is just being too far in to turn back. A point comes where the cost of retreat seems greater than the dread of annihilation to come. And then a strange, fatalistic quiet kicks in and slows your pulse, giving you strength for the last, calamitous push.
She's nearly there. The fat man is right behind her. As Mitya turns to his voice he sees Tess without registering her. He looks past her towards the calling voice, raising a hand to his friend, but as he starts to wave, his eyes flick back to find her. And then, as Mitya completes the turn, she sees that his other arm is around someone—a girl in a black dress. The old feeling floods back: she has been one of so many.
When she reaches Mitya his arms are open.
'It can't be true!' he cries kissing her four times on the cheeks. 'I thought I saw a phantom!' He's laughing, flushed. His teeth are mottled. He introduces her to the fat man, and to his girlfriend, who kisses her too.
'Ah yes, he's spoken of you,' the girl says. She is curious, not unkind.
Tess forgets their names immediately.
'Are you an artist also?' the fat man asks politely. She shakes her head.
Mitya seems to be moving from foot to foot, or swaying a little, shaking his head too. One side of his collar is above his jacket, the other under.
'Excusez-nous un petit moment,' he says, touching his girlfriend lightly on the forearm. 'I show Tess my work.'
The crowd parts for him without trouble and he leads Tess past a lot of people who, in another life, she might have known. They start at the front, with the most recent work. As they walk she sees that to move through the room is to move back through the last twenty years. The shapes on the canvasses become more and more recognizable, at first as sketched figures, then as women, but without faces.
At the far end are the only recognizably human forms in the retrospective. They are three small photographs of a girl in the corner of a work which is otherwise executed in paint. It is a cloudscape in shades of white and grey, an imaginary sky out of which Tess's younger, near-naked self seems to have fallen.
'After this,' Mitya lifts one shoulder, 'it all got more...' He gestures with his glass to the rest of the room, 'abstract.'
He uses the word 'abstrait' which can also mean 'hard to understand.' Or, she supposes, both.
On their way back to the others he tells her he married a French woman not long after Tess left Capri. The girl here tonight is his first girlfriend since his wife died. Before they reach the friends, he stops—so she does too.
'When you left, I felt I survived a plane crash.' He says it to the floor.
'You sent me home.' One glass of champagne and her mind is leaping, unfettered.
'No,' he's looking at her now, as if saying something he has wanted to say for a long time. 'I wanted you to choose. I wanted you not to be in two worlds at once, and only partly in mine.' And then he keeps walking.
She'd thought of herself for so long as having been generic, possibly interchangeable, that the idea that he'd been
vulnerable to her comes as a physical shock, a wave of cold. She sees she was a heedless, headhunting child, gathering scalps. On that balcony he was not daring her to a life of European complexity over Australian simplicity. He was asking her to make it her real life, by giving up some other, undermining dream.
Then she took home her souvenir of him, her scalp or lamp, and white-anted her life with it.
Tess gets another drink. She is uncharacteristically chatty with strangers, practicing her broken French with no concern for how terrible it sounds. Something is shifting in her, something Copernican and strange.
When she goes to say goodbye, Mitya says, 'I'll see you out.'
On the footpath he leans heavily against the building as he taps a softpack of Gauloises.
'Ridiculous, these non-smoking laws,' he says.
Tess laughs. She notices that his hair is entirely silver, and that he's spilt red wine on his blue shirt.
'Ça me fait du bien de te voir,' he says.
'It's good to see you, too.'
He asks about her life and she tells him of Dan, of Charlotte, Lorna and Tom. She almost says, 'You see: the expected categories,' but she doesn't. Because to say that seems suddenly to be the most disloyal thing. And because she wants to show Mitya that she has learnt, if only this minute, how to be in the one place.
'Une grande vie alors,' he says. 'A big life then.' He does a kind of gallic shrug, lifting his arms out and letting them flop at his sides.
Tess leans in and kisses him. It feels smoky and unfamiliar, and somehow anatomical. But that too, is right. She is grateful for this—what would you call it?—estrangement effect. She is grateful that the pilot light is blown out.
She has to get home.